Bibliographies

Marriage in Fifteenth-Century England:
Part II, Secondary Sources

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English Marriages in the Fifteenth Century: A Discussion of the Secondary
Sources
Sharon D. Michalove, Department of History,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sir John Paston, son of Margaret and John Paston, was betrothed to Anne
Haute during the winter of 1468 69. Because she was a kinswoman of
Elizabeth Woodville, the consort of Edward IV, this betrothal gave the
Pastons a new tie with the court, which was necessary to them as they tried
to safeguard the inheritance they had received from Sir John Fastolf. This
inheritance included Caister Castle, which was coveted by the Duke of
Norfolk, a powerful enemy. Therefore the Pastons needed a powerful
protector. Sir John felt he had found one in Anthony Rivers, Lord Scales,
the brother of the queen. Sir John was a courtier, and, with Edward IV's
court, was primarily based in London. He left the running of the Paston
property to his mother, Margaret, and his younger brother John II. The
Pastons were moving up from minor to major gentry.
But while the Paston family's thoughts were turned to marriage, not all
the marriage news was good. Margery Paston, Sir John's sister, had
clandestinely married Richard Calle the Paston's bailiff. Calle, who was
a valued member of the Paston retinue, was not considered a suitable match,
since he was only from a respectable merchant family. John Paston III
complained that the couple claimed that he looked favorably on their
marriage. Irate, he wrote to his brother Sir John, "if my father, whom God
assoil, were alive, and had consented thereto and my mother and you also,
|Calle| should never have my goodwill to make my sister sell candles and
mustard at Framlingham . . ."
Sir John's betrothal illustrates the type of marriage that historians of
fifteenth-century England consider typical a marriage for property and
prestige rather than a love match. But was Margery Paston Calle's marriage
an anomaly? Was a love match the exception rather than the rule? I hope,
through the secondary materials and primary sources, to find out.
The Paston letters and papers are one of four great fifteenth-century
collections. Three other family lives are illustrated the Celys, the
Stonors, and the Plumptons. Their letters and papers have all been
published, although not in as many editions as the Paston material. And
while all of these families have been studied and written about, they have
not been looked at as a group. I hope to bring together the various
threads of these lives and see whether their attitudes toward marriage were
similar and whether they can be used to draw any conclusions about marriage
in the merchant and gentry families of fifteenth-century England.
In searching the vast available secondary source material that either
touches on or deals specifically with marriage, some are useful for
pointing to possible methodological frameworks or for making comparisons.
The study Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of
1427 by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985) is useful in giving a model of fifteenth-century
marriage to compare against the English data. Herlihy's Medieval
Households (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) deals with
"Domestic Roles and Family Sentiments in the Later Middle Ages" as its
fifth chapter. Lawrence Stone's classic study The Family, Sex and Marriage
in England 1500 1800 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1979) carries the story
further in time, but also discusses methodology. His latest book, The Road
to Divorce also has some insights that might usefully inform this study.
Another study of England is Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England,
Press, 1990). Ingram's discussion of the differences between marriage
theory and marriage practice, as seen through court records is valuable.
And he makes the point that the attitudes prevalent in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were already well established by 1500. Another book
dealing with court records is London Church Courts and Society on the Eve
of the Reformation by Richard M. Wunderli (Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval
Academy of America, 1981). Wunderli is only dealing with crimes and spends
very little time on the subject of marriage, but the small amount that he
has to say is useful in setting the context. Alan Macfarlane, not to be
outdone by Lawrence Stone, has an even broader sweep in Marriage and Love
in England: 1300 1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). He looks at "the
purposes of marriage" and the "rules of marriage." His study has an
economic basis, and is interesting when viewing marriage as a business
arrangement. Another legal study is that of Richard Helmholtz, who looks
at canon law court cases and the theory of marriage in canon law in
Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1974).
Two books that deal with medieval attitudes toward marriage are The
Medieval Idea of Marriage by Christopher Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991) and Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by
James A. Brundage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Brooke looks at law, theology, architecture, and literature and discusses
famous examples including Abelard and Heloise and Henry VIII. While his
approach may be too theoretical and literary to be of direct use in my
study, his observations on demography and statistics give me yet another
method for comparison. In Brundage's book, the chapter "Sex, Marriage, and
the Law from the Black Death to the Reformation, 1348 1517," discusses law,
theory, and practice in marriage in the social context of late medieval
Europe. His geographical sweep is wide so comparative assessments can be
attempted. Another general book that discusses medieval marriage is
Shulamith Shahar's The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle
Ages (London: Methuen, 1983). Her chapter on married women deals with
law, property, and status, all relevant issues when looking at the
marriages in these families.
English history in the fifteenth century, while not particularly popular
with American historians, has seen a revival of interest among the British.
Studies have been made, on a broad scale, of the Pastons and the Celys,
although not of the Stonors and the Plumptons. Alison Hanham's The Celys
and Their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985) is a study by the
editor of the Cely letters for the Early English Text Society. Hanham
looks at the Cely marriages in the context of merchant society, but she
does not attempt to compare them to wealthy, nonmerchant families. As
society became more fluid in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, aristocrats did marry the daughters of merchants, so a
comparative view would be a logical next step.
The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: The First Phase by Colin
Richmond (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990) looks at
the same issues for the Pastons, not comparing them to the Celys but to the
aristocracy. This is the first in a four-part study. Richmond's paper
"Landlord and Tenant: the Paston Evidence," in Enterprise and Individuals
in Fifteenth-Century England, edited by Jennifer Kermode (Gloucester,
England: Alan Sutton, 1991), 25 42, despite its title, also deals with
aspects of marriage in the Paston family that are not in the larger work.
The material on Paston gains from their marriage alliances may reflect
material in later volumes.
While Frances and Joseph Gies' Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987) is a general work on medieval marriage, one
section is on the late middle ages. They use the Paston family in England
and the family of Lapo di Giovanni Niccolini dei Sirigatti, a wealthy wool
merchant in Florence as their two examples. The Gies stress "marriage
strategies and clashes between parental wishes and children's consent" in
looking at the differences in the marriages of sons and daughters in the
Paston family over several generations. The Florentines do not seem to
have so much difficulty over consent, so perhaps their daughters were more
obedient.
Other books that deal with the Pastons are Private Life in the Fifteenth
Century: Illustrated Letters of the Paston Family edited by Roger Virgoe
(New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989) and the classic study by H. S.
Bennett, The Pastons and Their England: Studies in an Age of Transition
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Bennett's book
was originally published in 1922 and a new edition was published last
year a testimony to the interest in the family and the readability of the
book. Bennett has a chapter on marriage but interestingly discusses
Margery Paston and Richard Calle in a chapter entitled "Love."
Joel Rosenthal is one American historian who is interested in
fifteenth-century England. His new book, Patriarchy and Families of
Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991) discusses the idea of marriage as family
strategy. He mentions the Celys and Stonors and discusses the Pastons at
some length. But the Plumptons are missing from this study.
Michael Hicks' "Descent, Partition and Extinction: The Warwick
Inheritance," in Richard III and His Rivals: Magnates and Their Motives in
the Wars of the Roses (London: The Hambledon Press, 1991), investigates the
marriages of George, Duke of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, to
the daughters of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, known as the Kingmaker.
Richard's marriage to Anne, the young widow of Henry VI's son, has been
characterized by Paul Murray Kendall as a love match that his greedy older
brother tried to thwart. But love match or not, Anne was a great heiress
and Hicks believes that it was Anne's property, not love that attracted
Gloucester. On the other hand, Anne also gained her inheritance by
escaping from her brother-in-law's custody. Each had much to gain and
little to lose.
Several other papers are of some interest. Anthony' Smith's "Litigation
and Politics: Sir John Fastolf's Defence of His English Property," in
Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, edited by
A. J. Pollard (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1984), 59 75, is
important in understanding the Pastons since they too had to defend
Fastolf's English property when they inherited it after his death. In the
same volume, "Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Late Medieval Dowagers," by
Rowena E. Archer (15 35), explains that some marriages had to be delayed
because an estate was tied up by a widow who lived on into old age and
might remarry several times. Her heirs had to wait for her to die because
the income from the estate could be tied up in her jointure for decades.
This was not only a problem in the gentry and aristocracy. Anne Crawford's
article, "The King's Burden: The Consequences of Royal Marriage in
Fifteenth-Century England," in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in
Later Medieval England, edited by Ralph A. Griffiths (Gloucester, England:
Alan Sutton, 1981), 33 56, argues that the financial settlement on a queen
at the time of her marriage could be a major drain on the king's treasury.
Finally, Keith Dockray looks at the question in "Why did Fifteenth-Century
English Gentry Marry?" in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval
Europe, edited by Michael Jones (Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton, 1986),
61 80. Dockray does look at the Plumptons, Pastons, and Stonors and
discusses the love versus property argument. But he treats the gentry in
isolation. I hope to carry his study further by comparing the gentry and
the merchant class.
Sharon Michalove,Academic Advisor
Department of History, UIUC